Doctor Who - 04 - On a Pale Horse

.13. On a Pale Horse

So the Doctor was procuring a miracle, which was more or less normal, but the miracle manufacturing took time. A lot of it. After a while Donna got tired with staring at the Doctor's bent back and listening to his mumbling and to his rasping, painful breath. And she became upset with the tone of the Doctor's exclamations of "No-no-no-no!" and "That can't be right!" and "Stupid!" He'd turn to look at her then, to give her a pale, unconvincing smile, and to say "Let's start again, shall we?" There were moments when the fever would take the better of the Doctor, and he would rest his head on his forearms for a while, or murmur something unintelligible, or look around as if surprised or scared of the surroundings. Still, Kathryn was there, with a pneumatic syringe and an assortment of phials. So every time the Doctor would start drifting away, the syringe would hiss, the medicine would pump into his veins, and the Doctor would get a grasp on reality again, and return to work, even more exhausted than before. The Doctor was procuring a miracle, but to look at him doing it was too much for Donna.

There was something else as well. She felt helpless again. A daft temp, not knowing what to do, how to help. The most important woman in the universe, right! Try the most useless one! There was the plague burning in the streets of Bristol, and there was the X-Factor killing even faster than the plague, and Donna was just sitting there, watching the Doctor racing death.

She left the lab quietly and for a while she just wandered along the abbey's long and dark corridors. Finally she found Cuthbert, his arms full of plastic bottles and bed sheets, trying to get to the dormitory. She held the door open for him, and at the same time a terrible odour almost knocked her over. The sickness had its smell and it was as bad as it gets; as if infected people were rotting from the inside even before they died. Cuthbert looked at Donna ironically as she stumbled backwards; shock on her face. Anger helped her regain her strength.

"Right," she said. "How can I help?"

For a moment Cuthbert looked as if he wanted to snap at her, but he reconsidered.

"You can change bottles with solution," he answered. "Have you seen how it's done?"

She nodded briefly, and Cuthbert handed her several containers with solution. He motioned her towards a bed at the end of the dormitory, right by the small window. Donna moved forward hesitantly. She whispered some comforting words to the withered figure curled under bed sheets and started replacing the bottle, her hands shaking badly. She wasn't good at it. She wasn't good at all. Pain, and fear and despair were suffocating her almost as badly as the horrible stench. And she was an inadequate nurse, fiddling with the bottle for much too long, and then struggling to remove air bubbles from a clear tube, so they wouldn't get into the sick man's circulation and stop his heart. Which would be a small mercy, if you thought of it like that.

"Donna?"

She turned towards the hoarse whisper.

"Allan." She smiled, although her lips trembled. "You awake?"

"What time is it?"

Donna moved closer to his bed and sat on a wooden stool. She wasn't quite sure if her legs would bear her. She realised suddenly that it was almost completely dark outside – another day withering to a rainy dusk. Somebody lit oil lamps and flickering shadows were now playing on stone walls of the dormitory.